Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

38 - Blood for Blood for Blood

"Alright, shut it down," Arrow barked to the contingent of specialist codebreakers, making a twirling motion in the air with one hand. "Total system wipe. No foxholes, no datavaults. Sweep it all."

The men and woman – a mix of Ardenne and Code Vector employees – gave a murmur of acknowledgement, and set about their allotted tasks, physically linking to the consoles all around them and setting about destroying the intricate, beautiful system architecture within.

Arrow had decidedly mixed feelings about it all. This kind of brute devastation was a little hands-on for their taste, but it had only been a matter of time before Vinder and those supporting his little quest for revenge started hitting back. The coup at AmpCore and Toran's subsequent counter-attack triggered an arms race, with ever-more vicious counter-measures and direct conflict among AmpCore agents in the data streams.

So here they were, out in the field – a footsoldier in a real corporate shadow war.

Arrow had killed a rival practitioner just to get in here. The young man's body lay somewhere in the rooms leading back through the Gammaton control hub, his brain torched by explosive feedback. They didn't need to see the body to know. They'd felt it when his firewalls had finally collapsed under the sustained assault. They felt a wrench of guilt and frustration at the memory.

He'd been good at his job. They'd simply been better. At another time in Hadrian's history, he would have been a valuable asset.

"Operative!" called the woman in charge of the codebreaker team. "We're ready!"

Arrow nodded, tearing their mind from the images of the dead man. "Torch it."

A moment later they felt the death scream of the Gammaton system, its higher order functions flayed apart by a barrage of simultaneously inacted attacks. Data centres went dark. Half-sentient computers imploded, unable to fully grasp what was being done to them before they were extinguished.

Alarms tried to sound; members of their team muffled them. Arrow kept their wand handy, occasionally intervening to eliminate an errant strand of malicious code, or emergency lifeboat software.

Nothing in the system survived. It was a massacre.

Arrow allowed themselves a small smile of satisfaction. Score one for team Knox. The smile disappeared as quickly as it came, however, when they felt a new intruder in the ravaged datastreams – a presence so firm and alive that it could only be another AmpCore practitioner. Not a friendly one, Arrow suspected, given where they were right now.

"Out," they barked, their voice punching directly into the earpieces of the codebreakers with fearsome clarity. The unaugmented corporate hackers didn't argue – they knew Arrow's senses outstripped theirs.

Footsteps clattered through the dying control centre, and Arrow took aim at the far end of the room with their amplifier, just as the heavy metal security doors screeched open. A brawny man in an AmpCore uniform stepped through, his wand sizzling with residual energy, and they could see armed guards behind him.

Just a little too late.

Even as the guards started barking warnings and taking aim at the retreating hackers, Arrow swept a thick, unnatural fog into existence, the molecules charged with electric particules to obscure even the most invasive of targeting software. Lights died around them, plunging the newcomers into a murky darkness.

Bolts of light from the AmpCore operative seared through the gloom as the man began carving a path through the fog, but Arrow was already off and running by then. Bringing up the rear, they sent every door slamming shut behind them, fusing the locking mechanisms and wrecking the controls as they went.